Lots of game publishers still don’t like female protagonists

The number of games that have only a male protagonist wouldn’t bother me so much if there was an equal number of games with female protagonists. Well now we know why that is. Publishers don’t think that having a female lead would work. Yet somehow games like Mirror’s Edge and Portal managed to be loved by so many gamers.

And for any guys who feel awkward playing a female character kiss a male character: deal with it. That’s what I’ve had to do in the numerous games where I had to play a male character with a romantic relationship with a female character. I survived without it scarring me for life, you can too. Who knows, maybe you’ll even grow up from it.

Back in 2013, Moris told Penny Arcade, “We had some [publishers] that said, ‘Well, we don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed. You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that.’” Moris also said of that game that the lead character’s gender “just felt right from the beginning of development,” and that changing it for marketing purposes would have “endangered the consistency of the whole game.”

Apparently with Remember Me, people took issue with male gamers playing a female character who kisses a male character. “We had people tell us, ‘You can’t make a dude like the player kiss another dude in the game, that’s going to feel awkward,’” said Moris. “I’m like, ‘If you think like that, there’s no way the medium’s going to mature,’” he said. “There’s a level of immersion that you need to be at, but it’s not like your sexual orientation is being questioned by playing a game. I don’t know, that’s extremely weird to me.”

Every description I have seen of The Old City: Leviathan has been…cryptic to say in the least. Most games strive to tell you all about their features, how you can do this or that. The Old City however, does not….

I had originally intended to write this yesterday, but instead spent most of the day feeling like someone had taken a baseball bat to my skull. So instead I wallowed in my own self-pity. 😛 So today I felt better…